AIM

MAIN PROVISIONS

• Defines harassment as conduct causing alarm or distress – including speech – and must involve the behaviour being repeated on at least two occasions.• Creates four new criminal offences, including the offence of harassment, a summary-only offence that carries a maximum prison term of five years, and causing a fear of violence, which carries a maximum term of five years.• Post conviction, a magistrate can issue a restraining order. Breaching these orders is punishable with up to five years' imprisonment.• Allows a victim of harassment to apply to a civil court for a civil injunction to prevent future harassment and for damages.• Breaching a civil injunction barring an individual from a particular area also carries a maximum prison term of five years.• The original act of parliament has been amended in several important ways by the Criminal Justice and Police Act 2001 and later by the Serious Organised Crime and Police Act [Socpa] 2005. The amendments introduce new offences, including harassment of a person in their home, and also confer additional powers on the police to issue directions for the purpose of stopping such harassment.• These powers make it an offence for a person subject to a direction to return to the vicinity of the premises within three months for the purposes of representing to, or persuading, the resident or another that they should not do something they are entitled to do, or that they should do something they are not obliged to do (by amending the Criminal Justice and Police Act 2001, Section 42 (7)).• The Criminal Justice and Police Act also extends the Protection From Harassment Act to cover harassment of two or more people who are connected (eg employees of the same company) even if each individual is harassed on only one occasion.

BACKGROUND

Act's Progress: Protection from Harassment

A number of pressure groups were responsible for the introduction of Britain's first anti-stalking laws, including the National Anti-Stalking and Harassment campaign led by Evonne Von Heussen. Von Heussen founded the National Anti-Stalking and Harassment Support Association (Nash) in 1993 and immediately began a public campaign to get government to offer the victims of harassment greater protection. Her campaign was born out of bitter personal experience; she was stalked for 17 years.

Over time, the campaign garnered the support of the Association of Chief Police Officers (ACPO) and the Police Federation, lobbied MPs and in 1996, the Labour MP Janet Anderson made an attempt to introduce an anti-stalking bill using the 10 minute rule. Her bill was dismissed by the Conservative government as unworkable but the home secretary, Michael Howard, recognised the need for anti-stalking laws. In late 1996 the government introduced an act that incorporated many of Anderson's suggestions.

Amendments to the act made by the Criminal Justice and Police Act 2001 and the Serious Organised Crime and Police Act were designed to target radical animal rights activists campaigning to close Huntingdon Life Sciences, the controversial drug testing company. These amendments created a new criminal offence to restrict protest outside residential premises.

The changes to the act made by section 125 of SOCPA allow companies to seek injunctions to prevent protests – they must only show that someone feels "alarmed or distressed" by the protesters.

CRITICISM

Although the act was designed to protect people from stalkers, in recent years the act has been widely criticised as being a weapon for corporations against peaceful protesters to stifle legitimate protest. Companies have used the act to apply for very broad injunctions to prevent any sort of protest against them. These injunctions can be granted not just against an individual or a specified group but also against anyone with notice of the injunction.

The act has been used to shut down protests against militarism and climate change. The Guardian columnist George Monbiot argues that it criminalises protest, claiming the legislation blurs the distinction between civil and criminal offences. The victim of the course of conduct may take a civil claim to the high court. On the basis of far less evidence than a criminal case requires, the court can grant an injunction against the defendant. If the defendant then breaks that injunction – by continuing to talk to the people he is seeking to dissuade, or to march, picket or protest – he then commits a criminal offence carrying up to five years' imprisonment.

In the most infamous case, the British Airports Authority (BAA) applied for the "mother of all injunctions" against AirportWatch, an umbrella organisation of groups including the National Trust, the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds (RSPB) and the Woodland Trust. Had BBA been granted the injunction, the five million members of these charities could have been banned from Heathrow airport and its surrounding areas as well as transport links to Heathrow including the Piccadilly line, large sections of the M4 and land surrounding Heathrow.

Liberty, the civil rights group, called it an example of a "dangerous and undemocratic trend" by large companies to seek to limit the right to protest.

Women's rights campaigners described the trend as a legal hijacking, arguing that laws designed to protect women were been commandeered to stifle protest and undermine other rights.

In January 2009, Edward Countryman, whose wife Yvonne Powell-Von Heussen was instrumental in drafting the act, wrote in the Guardian that "the act is being used to stifle dissent seems indubitable". He went on to say that parties responsible for the act did not intend it to be used to "protect faceless entities from the normal processes of politics and society."